“Not that I can see.” Tim knelt in the ring of boys. “He seems sick.”
Ephraim whispered, “Sick how?”
Tim sucked in his lips, thinking. “Sick like a fever, something like that. He’s very thin. He’s been asking for food.”
“Maybe he’s a Gurkha,” said Shelley, the words hissing between his teeth.
“He’s not a Gurkha,” Tim said, jaw tight to hold back a mounting queasiness—the man’s funk was seeping under the door, perfuming the room with its rotten-peach stink. “He’s… it could be a lot of things, okay? He could’ve been in some other country, some other part of the world, picked up a virus and carried it back with him.”
Kent said: “We should call the mainland, Tim.”
Tim gritted his teeth so hard that his molars squeaked in their gum beds.
“Yes, Kent. I’ve thought about that, and yes, I’ll do it. In the meantime, I need you boys to stay here. Is that clear?”
“You don’t need help?”
“No, Kent, I don’t,” Tim went on. “I’m a doctor, yes? I’m this guy’s best chance right now. But we don’t know what’s the matter yet, so this is the safest place for you.”
Tim opened the door. The frail light of the lantern fell upon a quartet of pinched, anxious expressions—all except Shelley, who stared listlessly at the canopy of cobwebs on the ceiling. He closed the door, debated a moment, then tilted a chair and jammed it under the doorknob.
Tim crossed the main room to the shortwave radio and clicked through the frequencies in search of the mainland emergency band. All he had was a tricked-out medical kit with a few more bells and whistles than your standard wilderness survival kit—items plucked from his own private stockpile. But if he radioed it in, they could send the medevac chopper in from Charlottetown and—
“Reeeeaaagh!”
The man staggered up, careening toward Tim like a sailor on a storm-tossed boat. With one swift motion he ripped the shortwave radio off the table, raised it above his head, and brought it down. It smashed apart in a squeal of feedback. A string of sparks popped inside the busted casing, issuing forth gouts of stinking electrical smoke.
The man brought his foot down on it, stomping with crazed strength. Tim put his arms out to stop him, tipping the lantern over and extinguishing the flame.
He grappled with the man in the dark. It was like wrestling a bag of snakes or steel cables coated in granular grease: cold, oily, and revolting.
“Goddamn it! Stop!”
The man snarled, a cruel silver sound that ripped through the dark like a band saw blade. He coughed something up; wet warmth splashed Tim’s face. Tim squealed thinly—he couldn’t help it—and wiped furiously at his cheek.
The man’s body suddenly went slack. Tim fought the urge to drop him, the way you might a fat-smeared tackling dummy.
Unclean! UNCLEAN!
The bunkroom knob squeaked, followed by a sequence of jarring thumps as the door shuddered against the chair. Tim pictured Kent hammering his shoulder against it, aiming to splinter it to pieces.
“Tim! Tim, open this door!”
Navigating clumsily in the dark, Tim guided the man back to the chesterfield. He felt around for the lamp, found it, relit it. Fetched the medical kit. He tore open packets of sterile wipes and furiously swabbed down every place the man had touched him, specifically his face. Whatever he’d spat up lingered on Tim’s skin—he could feel the dissipating sting, his flesh flushed red as if he’d been slapped.
“Tim!” Kent bellowed. “Open this door right now!”
“Stay inside!” Tim yelled—screeched, more like, his voice elevating to a teakettle shriek. “Try to open that door again, Kent Jenks, and I’ll make damn sure your father hears about it.”
Kent’s sullen footsteps retreated; the bedsprings squeaked as he slid back under the covers.
Tim filled a hypodermic needle with 100 mg of doxylamine. The man’s veins were easy to locate: a rail yard’s worth of blue tubes snaked at the crook of each elbow. After the injection, the man’s breathing normalized.
Greenish matter oozed out the side of his mouth. Is that what he’d spit up? Had he actually been eating rock slime?
Algae. Okay, it’s just algae. Algae’s not infectious. Algae’s just… gross.
Tim’s hand dropped to the man’s stomach—he felt it again. A subtle movement like an adder resettling itself under a warm blanket.
It’s just peristalsis. The man has a severe blockage in his intestines; all you’re feeling is a protracted flex as he tries to pass whatever it is.
Tim’s testicles drew up. He swooned with sudden unexplainable fear, his belly packed with cold lead. Who was this man? What in God’s name was the matter with him? Why the hell had he thought it right or appropriate to let him in here? Private hospitals can refuse treatment if a person’s condition is deemed a threat to others—what in God’s name had he done, turning a cabin on an isolated island into a trauma ward?
He reached for the man’s T-shirt, guided by a horrible impulse: pull it up. But even his morbid sense of curiosity resisted it. He didn’t want to see. Not now, at night, alone in this dark.
Except he wasn’t alone, was he? He swung the lamp toward the bunkroom door, the chair still wedging it shut.
“It’s okay,” Tim said, after moving the chair aside and stepping softly inside with the boys. “Please go back to sleep.”
“Who is that?” Kent’s voice had forfeited its thunder: he asked as a boy who was scared and too far from home.
“Like I said—a stranger. Someone who needed help, so I’m giving it to him. I don’t know where he’s from. He couldn’t even give me his name. He can barely talk. He’s asleep now.”
Tim saw his answer only intensified their worry, but found it impossible to offer anything more concrete. It was like one of those TV medical dramas where patients roll into the ER with mysterious ailments—the towheaded boy who weeps tears of blood; the high school prom queen whose head swells up like a beach ball—and only the brilliant pill-popping MD can suss it out: a hairline rip in the aqueous humor; the remains of a parasitic twin resting deep in the thalamic folds. Problem being, Tim was just a small-town sawbones, unremarkable and generally unambitious—none of which had been a problem until now.
Max said: “Well, how sick is he?”
Tim found it difficult to meet their searching eyes—fact was, he had no earthly idea. But he was the adult here, the authority—moral and otherwise—and it was his responsibility to tell them something if only to allay their fears, even as his own mounted.
“He seems manageable, guys. I’ve seen worse.” This lie came so smoothly that it shocked him. “We’ll get him to a hospital and let them deal with it.”
“The radio?”
“I can’t see right now,” Tim told Ephraim. “It may be broken.”
Kent said: “How did that…? It’s our only—”
“He got here in a boat, okay? If we need to get back to the mainland, we’ll take that. Now… go… to… bed.”
Tim turned and shut the door. The man breathed tortuously off to his right. His face radiated an unearthly light all its own, as if his veins ran with phosphorus. His features gave off the sick light of those poisonous mushrooms that grew in dank island caves.
An image came to Tim, plucked from the deepest recesses of his memory. A man’s face in a parking garage. Tim’s mother had taken him grocery shopping. He was five. The underground lot was nearly empty. They’d passed a huge cement stanchion, the load-bearing ones that kept the supermarket from collapsing, burying them under shelves of creamed corn and Frosted Flakes. A shape leaned against it. A pile of water-fattened trash bags? The pile stirred, shifted, and a face materialized. Tim told himself—he told himself today—that the man must’ve fallen prey to the commonplace decays, drink and drugs and disease… but his younger eyes, his boyhood eyes, had seen something else entirely.